Nan Li

nan-li-profile.jpg

Utrecht University

Department of Information and Computing Sciences

n.li@uu.nl

I am a PhD candidate in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing in the Natural Language Processing group at Utrecht University, advised by Prof. Massimo Poesio and Prof. Albert Gatt.

My research takes a perspectivist view of meaning: interpretation depends on the information and perspectives available to each interlocutor. I am broadly interested in dialogue, grounding, and how language and vision-language models represent meaning variation.

My work is part of DeMeVa and is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) through the AiNed Fellowship Grant. I hold bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computational Linguistics, both from Peking University, under the supervision of Prof. Weidong Zhan. I also interned at the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Peking University, working with Prof. Zhifang Sui.

See full CV

news

Sep 04, 2026 One paper accepted to MINT @ EMNLP 2026 (oral). See you in Budapest in October!
Aug 31, 2026 We released interactive MapTask visualizations for our LREC 2026 and SIGDIAL 2026 papers.
Aug 31, 2026 One paper accepted to LM Playschool @ EMNLP 2026. See you in Budapest in October!
Jul 27, 2026 One poster accepted to SemDial 2026. See you in Loughborough in September!
Jul 20, 2026 Giving a talk at HLV-DP @ ESSLLI 2026. See you in Prague in August!
Jun 01, 2026 One paper accepted to SIGDIAL 2026 (oral). See you in Atlanta in August!
Feb 13, 2026 One paper accepted to LREC 2026 (oral). See you in Palma de Mallorca in May!
Aug 25, 2025 One paper accepted to NLPerspectives @ EMNLP 2025 (poster). See you in Suzhou in November!

selected publications

  1. Figure from: Gaze as Evidence for Common Grounding: A Cross-Corpus Analysis of MapTask and MUNDEX
    Gaze as Evidence for Common Grounding: A Cross-Corpus Analysis of MapTask and MUNDEXOral
    arXiv preprint , Sep 2026
    Accepted to the MINT Workshop at EMNLP 2026
  2. Figure from: Acquire, Repair, Preserve: A Diagnosis-Guided Post-Training Recipe for Small-Model Dialogue Game Agents
    Acquire, Repair, Preserve: A Diagnosis-Guided Post-Training Recipe for Small-Model Dialogue Game Agents
    Nan Li
    arXiv preprint , Aug 2026
    Accepted to the LM Playschool Workshop at EMNLP 2026
  3. Figure from: Seeing Is Not Sharing: Some Vision-Language Models Overestimate Common Ground in Asymmetric Dialogue
    Seeing Is Not Sharing: Some Vision-Language Models Overestimate Common Ground in Asymmetric DialogueOral
    In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL), Aug 2026
  4. Figure from: Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTask
    Grounded Misunderstandings in Asymmetric Dialogue: A Perspectivist Annotation Scheme for MapTaskOral
    In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), May 2026